We’re all yelling (largely in unison) but once again I’ll bring up that the chance for ‘moderates’ to claim the party was probably sometime in the immediate post-Regan years. That was when the Religious Right became the tail that started to Wag the Dog. As it grew ever more dominant, then they could have realized they were becoming welded to that specific ideology rather than any semblance of a “conservative” political platform. And each election, a new, more reactionary faction would be added, from the various nay-sayers starting with Newt, to the Tea Party, to Qanon and MAGA. And of course, the Chaos Caucus of right now.
Each and every time they’ve embraced the most extreme in order to keep their numbers up. And now, anything resembling the conservatives of the past (the moderates of the OP) are almost entirely forced out, retired, or merely looking on in horror as they refuse to vote or even do so reluctantly for the Democrats.
And if anything, the trend is accelerating. So, yeah, the party was bartered away to ever-more crazy factions for votes, over the period of decades. As I said in another thread, the current Republican party is an anti-democratic, no platform populist party merely united around it’s hate of the other, with no actual platform, which wears a tattered skin bag Edgar-suit of the former Republican party and some of their slogans.
Or to put it even more graphically, the Republican’s invited the parasitic entities in, hoping to benefit from their vitality, and have in turn, been eaten from the inside out. The last bit with the speaker being only the most obvious bit about how the dead skin and facade of the Republican party is now tearing showing what’s really left inside.